Saturday fire destroyed two homes

Fire investigators say the cause of a fire that destroyed two homes in Hamburg Township on Saturday remains unknown, but they know it started in an attached garage.

Chief Mark Hogrebe of the Hamburg Township Fire Department said the northwest corner of the garage at a home in the 8800 block of Lagoon Drive held a golf cart, four-wheeler and other mechanical equipment.

“Things were so badly damaged it was hard to get an exact cause,” the chief said Monday. “After interviews with everyone, it doesn’t appear to be suspicious. It was just an unfortunate thing. …

“The (firefighters) fought the fire well. We were also grateful that nobody got hurt,” Hogrebe said.

Deputy Chief Nick Miller said the call came in around 6:30 p.m. Saturday that a home with an attached garage was burning in an area near Century Drive in the Ore Lake View subdivision. When firefighters arrived, the garage was fully involved and burning into the house, and the blaze had jumped to a neighbor's home.

"It did have a jump on us, but we don’t know why yet," he said.

The second house, which was located about 10 feet to 15 feet from the neighboring home, was 20 percent involved when the first crew arrived within four minutes of the 911 dispatch, Miller noted.

Hogrebe said the homeowner indicated that he, his wife and one son were watching television while another son was doing homework upstairs when the house caught fire. He said the homeowner “smelled something … burning,” opened the garage door and saw black smoke.

The homeowner, identified by neighbors and friends as Erich Ross, then called out to his family. Once family members were out, the matriarch, Sheena Ross, got both dogs out, Hogrebe said.

No one was home at the second residence and no firefighters were injured in the blaze.

Multiple crews are battling a blaze at a home on Lagoon Drive in Hamburg Township on Saturday night.(Photo: Gillis Benedict/Livingston Daily)

Neighbor Sara Keil was driving home when she saw the smoke as she exited off U.S. 23 onto the Silver Lake Road exit.

There were “multiple explosions,” which Miller said is “fairly common” in a house fire due to propane tanks and other common household items.

“There was nothing abnormal or odd” about the explosions, he noted.

It took firefighters from five area departments an estimated 90 minutes to get the fire under control. They used an estimated 100,000 gallons of water, some of which came from Ore Lake.

Firefighters were on scene for about six hours to seven hours, including cleanup. Part of the problem, Miller said, was firefighters had to wait a “couple hours” for a Consumers Energy crew to arrive on scene to handle a burning gas meter on the home.

“They could not shut it off at the house,” he said. “It didn’t hinder our abilities to extinguish the fire, but it did in the cleanup stage.”

Hogrebe said there “was a serious gas leak” and it took Consumers Energy about two hours to secure the gas line.

In all, an estimated 40 firefighters from Hamburg, Green Oak, Brighton, Putnam and Northfield were on scene.

A GoFundMe page — which can be found by clicking here — has been created to help the family.